Mini Site Network - would it be equivalent to a blog network?

this company that made one of my soon to be ex-clients websites uses and is
going to be implimenting use of more of these "mini" sites they make.

They expalined to me that its a copy of your site, with different content one ONE page and a different partial EMD or not at all url.

this sounds VERY spammy / similar to what blog networks are.

now is this still a viable backlink building option after the blog network slap 2 weeks ago, or is this
spammy / similar enough that it could have negative effects towards rankings once they
start to build more and more.


thank you!

My main concern with this is if you are going to going after multiple keywords why dont you just build out some good interior pages for them.

Think about it as a empty bowl.. if you keep filling it up with water, eventually it will be full. But if you have to fill up multiple bowls, then you are just wasting water.

It is getting hard enough these days to rank a website.. so why try to rank 10 of them..

As far as negative effects, one thing I can think of is if all these sites are hosted on the same server google will most likely discredit these links that might connect the sites to one an other.

I tried something similar in the electronic cigarettes niche.. I bought 20 domains that were keyword based, and i already have a site that has been around since 2008 and doing quite well. What I was trying to do was to make each mini site based on the keywords. What I found was this is very very time consuming to build out 20 sites and put content on each one and link to each one individually. So what I did instead was just 301'd all these sites to a specific page in my main site for that keyword.. now I am pulling in some good longtail traffic and my site is starting to rank higher for my main keywords.

Is there any blog network still live with quality blogs ?